Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

Abstract

In this self-portrait by an American genius, Kurt Vonnegut writes with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favorite comedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, and various cockamamie...

Character mediation of plot structure: Toward an embodied model of narrative

“…However, by not specifying the dynamics of the hero's emotionality, the hero's journey is not able to explain how heroes in different stories experience different changes. Vonnegut's (1981) six plot types are able to differentiate stories depending on the dynamics of the rises and falls in a story. However, these rises and falls are not specific to the protagonist's psychology; they refer instead to changes that happen to the protagonist, not the feelings and actions experienced by the protagonist.…”

“…The difference is that role-based models such as the hero's journey are focused on the role of the protagonist, while event-based models such as Propp's have little regard for the specifics of characters (Murphy, 2015). Other role-based plot models include Vonnegut's (1981) six story shapes, Friedman's (1955) three plots, Booker's (2004) seven basic plots, Tobias' (1993) twenty master plots, and Weiland's (2016) three types of character transformations. These plot models each describe a list of possible plot types that can account for any story and that outline a designated journey for particular protagonist roles, such as Vonnegut's "rags-to-riches" plot for an impoverished protagonist.…”

“Epistemic justice” (a memoir)

“…In short, Emma Jane introduces herself to the reader by means of what Kurt Vonnegut once called 'a blivit', which he defined as 'two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag'. In Palm Sunday, 5 Vonnegut celebrates his own combination of incommensurables as 'an all-frequencies assault on the sensibilities', made of 'fiction, drama, history, biography and journalism' (1982, p. 14). He wants to combine 'the tidal power of a major novel with the bone-rattling immediacy of front-line journalism … the flashy enthusiasms of musical theatre, the lethal jab of the short story, the sachet of personal letters, the oompah of American history, and oratory in the bow-wow-style' (1982, p. 13).…”

Love and Charity: A Biblical Humanistic Study of Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

“…(Vonnegut, 1997) Despite this agnostic humanism, the influence of Christ is seen in many of his works. In his autobiographical work Palm Sunday, Vonnegut says that he was a "Christ-worshipping agnostic" (Vonnegut, 1981), because in the same book he noted that "the Sermon on the Mount suggests a mercifulness that can never waver or fade" (Vonnegut, 1981). He then writes in his non-fiction collection A Man Without a Country, "There"s only one rule that I know of: God damn it, .…”